Page 20 of Autumn Queens & Shadows

“You said to take you wherever I go. I want to see the world.”

I can see mine just fine from here.

“Settled,” she said at my silence, her head lolling in my direction until it rested on my shoulder. Her dark lashes fluttered fast up at me. “Next time we will see the real ones.”

“Didn’t you hear me?”

“You always do as I say, so do as I say.”

“You keep behaving like a spoiled little princess these days.”

Her smile was coy. “I’m a spoiled princess. So, spoil me. Pet me. Pamper me. Adore me.” She suddenly stood and reached out a hand to me. “Dance with me. Neo wants me to go with him to a dance hall next weekend and I can’t make it past step five without injuring someone.”

Before I could tell absolutely the hell not and spit about a thousand lies about Neo and his small dick, she grabbed a bunch of my shirt and pulled me up as if she exercised like a three-hundred-pound soldier. She was quick to arrange my limbs around her and hers around me.

Her eyes pinched at me with a glare. “Move.”

“Say please. Say ‘please, Mal, move’.”

“You really think I have pride? Please, please, please!” she repeated, hoping from one foot to the other, looking up at me.

Ignoring the way she avoided saying my name how I wanted her to say it, I threw my head back and chuckled for a moment so I could gather my scattered thoughts and depleted will to hold a fort against her.

Then I moved.

My mother loved to dance, she’d made me dance with her whenever her illness had deceived her and hid away for a few tricking moments. She loved music, art and nature. She’d loved everything beautiful and fragile and soft. She’d loved Thora, too. I was so much like my mother. But I was so much like my father, too. And he loved to break anything beautiful and soft and so colourful. He would have loved to break something like her.

Maybe I did, too, considering I’d yet to tell her to run far, far away from someone like me.

Thora’s grin was huge while I twirled her around and pulled her to me closer and closer each time without her realising at all that our bodies were one broken restraint away from touching.

I touched that smile and she jolted just slightly, but not from fear. “You like it that much?”

She nodded, her eyes falling to my fingers moving over her lips. “In my head, it is so beautiful.”

“Take me there.”

Through the darkness, I could see her cheeks pinken, turning the same colour of ribbons she had arranged in her hair and tied around her neck. “It’s the middle of April,” she whispered as if she was telling me a secret, her eyes jumping from my eyes to my lips. “We’re in the middle of a grand hall made of walls entirely of ice. The weather is gentle and warm, but there is snow, too. It falls like star fall. It glows as it falls to the ground. There are about a dozen violins and a grand maple piano in the middle of it all. Distant wind chimes and crystals that reflect the sun and fill the room with rainbows. There is no one, but me and you. And—”

“And?”

“I don’t know. Usually there is more.” She looked around, her gaze wandering lost. “But I like it here, too. This part I don’t have to fantasise about. My mind could never make it this perfect.” Then she whispered, “I’m happy here.”

When I spun her again, I pulled her body flush against mine. She noticed it this time, she might have noticed my heartbeat, too, because she went quiet, her cheeks flushed entirely red. “Your tits are bigger than mine.”

I sighed, half relieved that she so innocently ruined almost every awkward moment between us. “Thora, sweetheart, they are not tits.”

“You might need a brassier or a corset if they get any bigger, Malik, I’d be careful with all those push-ups.”

“You little shit.”

She giggled a little and then rested her cheek on my chest, going silent again as if she could hear her name being called. “Take me to your world, too.”

She’d asked me before, and as all the other times, I was going to tell her that the world she was thinking of was just a nightmare now. It wasn’t a world at all. Not one I could alter. No one could alter nightmares. They were just memories. And memories were haunting. It was their job, I did not blame them. I just had a lot of haunting memories.

But this time I wanted to show her just to see if she could alter them like she’d altered my dreams. Thora Krigborn had that gift. She could make such ugly things shine. She could polish coal into diamonds. This girl had a way to make you believe anything. Perhaps she’d spent more time convincing herself of things that were not real than real, perhaps because even though she wore a tainted shell over that iron pit of a heart she had, she had never, not once, let herself believe she was anything but pristine.

“There is a condition,” I said.